Robert Wilson - Instruments of Darkness

‘What about the four suits coming round to my place with half a brain between them?’

‘Madame Severnou trades with other people’s money. If she loses it, they get upset. She has to protect herself…’

‘Against me?’

‘She was annoyed with me and she was going to send the message back through you. She wanted to remind you of your position in the deal. She wanted to show you that she was a principal and that principals have to be respected.’

Jack wanted to think of another five reasons why Madame Severnou should have sent the gunmen round but couldn’t, so be poured himself another drink and refilled my glass. He was calming down now. He forced one of his cheesy grins on me which I swatted away.

‘Why didn’t you just give her the original?’ he asked in one of those voices of disarming simplicity that normally get the people who use them hurt.

‘She’s the sort of woman who you shake hands with and she checks her jewellery, you check your fingers and when you get home you find she’s taken the shirt off your back and some of your skin’s gone with it.’

‘She’s not that bad.’

‘She resents the fact that you’re breathing air that she could be breathing.’

‘You’ll warm to her eventually.’

‘Like I will to a puff adder on coke. And anyway, why didn’t you explain all this shit to me?’

‘I didn’t think you’d give her the copy.’

‘You pay me to manage things for you in Cotonou. If you want a gofer…’

‘All right, Bruce. I admit it. I should have been clearer.’

Jack defused rows by conceding but not giving an inch. We both sat down on a couple of wooden loungers with foam rubber mattresses. Jack balanced his drink on his belly and looked up at the stars which weren’t there. He pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket and offered me one without thinking. He plugged one into his mouth, lit it, and drew on it as if he was trying to keep his cool in the trenches. He let the smoke trail out of his nose and from between his teeth and it disappeared off behind his ear.

He leaned forward and split his legs on either side of the lounger. He reached for an ashtray, put it in front of him and winced with his right cheek and eye.

‘I have no sympathy for you, Jack. You get less than you deserve.’

‘I bear the scars of love,’ he said, as if it was a terrific bore.

‘Love, Jack? I didn’t think that was your scene.’

‘Love, African style,’ he cautioned me with his cigarette.

‘How does that go?’

‘She likes me. I want her. She lets me. I pay her.’

‘I’d forgotten how romantic it was.’

‘The women here aren’t fools.’

‘Who said they were?’

‘They’re not fooled into thinking romance exists. They know what exists.’

‘Let me guess. Money and power?’ Jack somersaulted the cigarette in his hand and stabbed the air with it. ‘Exactly. Haven’t you noticed, I don’t go with white women any more?’

‘I haven’t consulted my black book recently.’

‘Well, I don’t. They’re too complicated.’

‘You don’t have to pay…’

‘…money. That’s what I mean. You sleep with them and before you know it you’ve got a relationship, they’ve moved in and they’re supervising your life like it’s a school project. Jesus. What I want is…’ He trailed off.

‘What do you want, Jack?’

‘I don’t want that.’

‘Whatever you do want, you’re not finding it.’

Jack wasn’t listening any more. I had exhausted his attention span between thoughts about sex. He smoked an inch of his cigarette in one drag and let out more smoke than a bonfire on a wet November afternoon.

‘There is one white woman I would like to have,’ he said from behind his smokescreen. I didn’t respond but sipped my whisky and did some passive smoking.

‘Elizabeth Harvey.’

‘Never heard of her. Is she a movie star?’

‘You know her. She’s married to that American banker.’

‘Clifford Franklin Harvey the seventh.’

‘The seventh?’

‘Americans always have Christian names like surnames and numbers like royalty.’

‘What do you think?’

‘She doesn’t look like one night stand material to me.’

He gave me an alarming grin followed by a diabolical laugh and some vestiges of smoke left in his lungs from the last toe-reaching drag came out of it.

He took the final drag from his cigarette, which was so hot he had to whip it out of his mouth before his lips blistered. He crushed it mercilessly into the ashtray.

‘You’re right.’

‘I think she’s Catholic, too.’

‘You’ve seen her kicking with her left foot.’

‘I’ve seen her coming out of a Catholic church.’

‘Perfect,’ said Jack. ‘To attain the unattainable, Bruce. That’s an excitement in life. What are you doing hanging around churches?’

‘Hoping for a bit of salvation to rub off.’

Jack laughed, a high-pitched giggling laugh, and shook his head.

‘Oh Bruce,’ he said with mock pity, ‘sometimes I think you’re my brother, other times my son.’

‘Naivety’s one of my strongest suits.’

Jack looked up like a dog over its dinner. He lit another cigarette and rolled it across his bottom lip. The paper and tobacco crackled as he drew on it.

‘I forgot to tell you. Heike called.’

‘Thanks.’

‘I told her you’d gone to Accra. She said something in German.’

‘Did it hurt?’

‘She said she was going to Porto Novo tonight and she’d be back at your place tomorrow afternoon.’

I chewed my thumbnail for a minute and Jack inspected the video zapper which told me the interview was over. I asked if I could stay the night, saying I’d go to Charlie’s bar and see if anybody there knew anything about Steven Kershaw.

‘Do you want to bet, Bruce?’ Jack asked as I juddered down the spiral staircase.

‘On what?’ I said without looking up, just hearing his voice.

‘That I can bed Elizabeth Harvey before you find Steven Kershaw.’

‘You’re a sick man, Jack. You’re making too much money. It’s creasing your moral fibre.’

He wasn’t listening. The soap opera voices had started another crisis in another world.

I showered and changed and went out into the cool night and the smell of wet grass. The cicadas were practising. The inside of my car smelt of wet newspaper and damp carpeting. I shut the car door waiting for the satisfying thunk and heard a chord from a cheap guitar with a broken string.

The lights were back on in downtown Lomé and the place was full of music. A shop selling cassettes had set up some speakers on the street and for half a mile nobody was walking without a wriggle or a jerk. Three girls with snack food in large aluminium bowls on their heads stood together and bobbed up and down and turned around in time.

I came out on to the coast road and headed east out of Lomé. A wind was blowing through the low palms along the beach. The stiff leaves knocked against each other and made a harsh clapping noise like a few sarcastic people in an audience.

The Hotel Sarakawa looked like a recently landed space craft illuminating the dark and attracting humans for observation. The port was lit and it looked as if there might be work going on. Charlie’s bar was on the beach a mile beyond the port. There was a rough track through some wasteland from the metalled road up to his compound which continued a further two hundred yards to another bar called Al Fresco’s where the track looped back to the Lomé/Benin road.

At the entrance the gardien checked the car and opened the barrier. I parked outside a huge paillote which was the restaurant part of the bar. The paillote was a massive thatched cone supported by wooden beams. There was seating for a hundred people and a bar underneath. It was empty. It always was after rain. Next to the paillote was a concrete building which Charlie had built a couple of years ago with profits from all those fingers he had in all those pies. This was the real bar. A huge open plan room looking out to sea with a thirty-foot bar on the back wall, seating for fifty around a piano and a lot of room to stand and fall in.